Influencers rival Biden administration in helping borrowers manage student debt

President Joe Biden’s effort to sell millions of Americans on paying down their college loans is struggling to keep up with a group wielding a powerful megaphone: social media stars.

With debt collection starting this month for the first time in more than three years, the hashtag #studentloans has now surpassed 1.3 billion views on TikTok — and borrowers and self-appointed personal finance gurus are churning out videos to meet demand. They offer tips for slashing payments but some are adding to the internet’s stew of falsehoods that bury the occasional piece of solid advice.

Student loan borrowers say they want more from the Biden administration. But the White House is woefully outmatched by content creators — the social media stars with large followings and a knack for short-form video editing — reaping the benefits of people desperate to escape their debt. Losing Gen Z and millennial borrowers to online self help risks letting confusion fester into frustration and turning one of Biden’s biggest economic promises into an election liability.

“We're hearing from people that there's just a lot of confusion and they don't really know where to go for help,” said Andrew Weber, the founder of MyCreditCounselor, who regularly posts videos on TikTok about student loans. “That opens the door for misinformation or these debt relief scammers.”

A few accounts offer tricks for reducing monthly payments to zero under Biden’s newest repayment plan, SAVE. Others encourage borrowers to join a debt strike and pay dues to a “debtors union” fighting for student loan forgiveness. And then there are videos from more traditional experts — lawyers and certified financial professionals — who are trying to push back on bad counsel.

While the Biden administration has sought to shore up student loan allies online among influencers, its own social media game — to use a technical term — is pretty cringe. The White House’s single TikTok video on SAVE has one lonely like and fewer than 100 views. The same video has about 101,000 views on its Instagram page. The Education Department has 49 followers on TikTok but hasn’t posted any videos about the repayment option it’s advertising elsewhere. And on Instagram, where the agency has about 55K followers, there’s only one post about SAVE and none about entering repayment.

The White House has posted several still photos encouraging people to apply for SAVE, but many borrowers say they prefer a video or person explaining the program.

Influencers, however, say they’ve seen an uptick in interest in their videos for borrowers. But debt holders searching for information from the administration feel abandoned.

“If the government is trying to help us be educated on what the next steps are and what it is that we need to do, they are failing pretty epically,” said Alex Kassan, who is working to pay down more than $100,000 in student loan debt from her master’s degree in public health. “It sort of feels like, to me personally and to a lot of my peers, that we've just been left high and dry.”

The White House did not respond to several requests for comment.

About 41 percent of millennials and Gen Z rely on social media for financial advice, according a Webster Bank survey released this month. In comparison, only 20 percent of older generations said they use the platforms for advice.

Kassan said she first found the Biden administration’s federal loan repayment simulator on Reddit, and then an Instagram live video from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) helped her to understand the administration’s SAVE plan before she enrolled.

“It was the first time I had ever seen anyone speak about it in that way and make it easily understandable to me,” Kassan said.

Kassan, who’s in her 20s, said an email she received from the Education Department led to a student loan website she found too difficult to follow. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have been urging the department to ramp up its communication with borrowers about repayment. But their main lines of communication include snail mail and e-mail.

“Any of these social media platforms would really be a much better place than a spam email that I've never even seen or am not reading,” Kassan said.

Before the Supreme Court tossed Biden’s loan forgiveness program, many borrowers were not as interested in searching for repayment options because they were hopeful sweeping relief was on the way.

Jade Warshaw, co-host of The Dave Ramsey Show, a popular radio program that has offered financial advice for about 30 years, said she and the Ramsey team used to get pushback on social media for saying that student loan forgiveness was not coming. But now that borrowers have received their first bills, Warshaw said the tone has changed dramatically.

“We saw that mood shift into this, ‘Oh, crap. This is happening. This is a reality and I've got to get my stuff together,’” said Warshaw, who graduated college in 2007.

Warshaw joined the team in 2022. Sharing her story about paying off more than $280,000 in private student loan debt with her husband has been a key part of her pitch to listeners.

As the show started receiving more questions about repayment, the Ramsey team unveiled a hub for student loan information. In September, they hosted a livestream about student debt in America which has racked up more than 134,000 views on YouTube.

“We came out of school, and no one prepared us for personal finance,” she said. “We're just winging it. So what are we supposed to do? Here's social media coming to the rescue. And you really have to be careful because there are a lot of people out there who, really, what they're operating on is a theory.”

During the repayment pause, a movement began to grow on social media for borrowers to ask their loan servicers to refund borrowers’ money in anticipation of receiving up to $20,000 of forgiveness under the administration’s initial plan, Warshaw said.

It was terrible advice, and guess what happened? There was no forgiveness,” she said.

Weber, who has a TikTok following of nearly 10,000 people and is a certified student loan counselor, said many of his followers come to his page for help with paying private loans. Several have also told him they’ve been struggling to get help from student loan servicers who have been overwhelmed with calls during the start of repayment.

“People like talking and interacting with a real person,” he said. “At the same time, there's the capacity for more misinformation on TikTok and less policing of that.”

With his channel, Weber tries to focus on private student loan borrowers who are “getting crushed” by high interest rates and combating misinformation in that space.

Blair Huddy, a public relations professional in her 30s, has seen her TikTok following grow beyond 34,000 this year while posting videos on her own student loan situation. Huddy went viral after she responded to a podcast from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) that characterized loan forgiveness seekers as “young unemployed slackers smoking bongs.” Huddy’s response video, which was her first on student loans, published in July and has 127,500 views on TikTok. She has continued to post videos while acknowledging that she is not a loan professional.

“I kind of just leaned into it and figured, you know, it seems like people are really responding to having somebody who knows what they're going through that has learned a lot,” Huddy said, adding that she shares information as she learns more about her repayment options for the roughly $180,000 of debt she took on to get her master’s degree.

Huddy signed up for the SAVE Plan, which she learned about when her followers started asking her questions about it. She learned that she qualified for a $0 payment under the plan, which was far more manageable than the $1,000 a month she would have been required to pay. But Huddy said her following has increase because of the way she is able to break down loan repayment developments in a conversational way, unlike the Education Department.

“They're using government terms, acronyms, things that the layperson doesn't understand,” she said. “A lot of us wish that the government and specifically the Department of Education would just talk to us like people.”